Rhakios wrote:I think you'll find that Steve's aversion to Flash can be explained by his being shocked by an old man in a dirty raincoat when he was at an impressionable age.

Surely more to do with the fact that using flash drains your batteries faster.

I think there might be a bit more to it than that. If it was just the battery, then Apple would start selling own-brand external batteries, there are plenty of them available as it is.

Its because Apple want to control which apps are available for the iPhone / iPod / iPad. If they allow Flash then they lose that control.

Here's a little tale to illustrate how far Apple will go to maintain its stranglehold of iApps:

Many of you may be aware of a rather neat teaching language called Scratch by MIT.

It makes learning to program fun and allows kids to see results quickly (have a try, it really is fun, and there is a Linux version).

There is a Java based "player" that allows kids to deploy their apps to the Scratch web site for other to see. On top of this, someone (unconnected with MIT) wrote an iPhone app to "play" scratch scripts. It was up on the App store for a short while.

Then Apple banned it (for the same reason it won't allow Flash).

That's right. Apple banned a kids educational toy because it allowed them to write (very crude) apps for the iPhone that were outside of Apple's control.

Rhakios wrote:I think you'll find that Steve's aversion to Flash can be explained by his being shocked by an old man in a dirty raincoat when he was at an impressionable age.

Surely more to do with the fact that using flash drains your batteries faster.

I think there might be a bit more to it than that. If it was just the battery, then Apple would start selling own-brand external batteries, there are plenty of them available as it is.

Strapping external batteries to an iPhone? That would be far too uncool for Apple. My old flash unit has batteries built in, sadly it only fits SLR cameras. Or did you mean some other kind of flash, Rhakios? (and before you ask, no I'm not going to reveal my old flash unit to you).

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